Google has a dominant position (among other places) in the browser market so site owners can't disregard their imposition. Saying that you can install other browsers would have been just like saying "you can install another OS" when Microsoft played leverage games with their near monopoly on the desktop back in the times. Plus, Chrome tends to end up installed on the PCs of many unexperienced users because of their policy of aggressive bundling. So one can expect that a relevant portion of his site's visitors will be using Chrome in the foreseeable future no matter what.

That's because the law doesn't say "you can own guns full stop", it will say something like "you can own guns as specified by law", so lower-level laws can be passed to regulate the ownership of guns without violating the constitution. But no person or government agency can decide that you can't own a gun without having a law that backs their decision.

You are right in the fact that most constitutions, and probably that of the USA too, comprise some kind of exceptional procedures allowing the government to override the rule of law in the case of an emergency. I think that they're required in order to deal with those cases such as angry people with pitchforks burning down cities etc, something that still happened once in a while in the past century, but I don't expect those procedures to have been applied often nowadays.

You can't waive your right to state provided legal counsel: you can decline to accept one when you're offered, but you can't sign a piece of paper saying that from that moment on you won't be offered any if you get into a trial.

And I don't think people have the *right* to lie: having a right to something doesn't mean having the permission to do that thing, it means that there's some law stating explicitly that that something must be given to those who haven't got it.

Anyway, I was wrong in my post above: there appears to be no explicit law against entrapment, if I understand correctly it's just a matter of interpretation by the courts, which has oscillated over the course of years.

In countries under the rule of law, rights can not be given up. Just like a law cannot override the constitution, any piece of paper you might sign or be forced to sign cannot override the law. Not even in the case of the most obvious scum of mankind. That's because once you set up the principle that the government can selectively take away your rights, then the citizens can by the same principle selectively ignore the laws they don't like. Including those that define and give authority to the government.

The cost of building *everything* in China is at least 1/3, with well-known results, such as extreme pollution.

That the trade union of nuclear professionals advocates for nuclear power is unsurprising, grant me this consideration.

The wikipedia link that you pointed me to says that China has intentions to bring nuclear power usage to 6% in 2020 up from its current 2% whereas the regulated US were at 19% last year, and the hyper-regulated France was at 75%.

Conclusion: nuclear blossoms in social-democratic countries with a strong central government that invests large amounts of taxpayers' money as subsidies to the industry (or owns it directly).

And thorium reactors are nice, except that they have problems too, the biggest one being of course that they currently do not exist in a profitable form, while nuclear power fundamentalists regularly mention them as the obvious, current solution for every woe of nuclear power.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a nuclear power proponent myself, especially after I've seen the damages done by supposedly green energy sources and their governmental subsidy policies. I just don't like echo chambers.

If that were true, we'd be seeing nuclear power plants flowering under authoritarian regimes, whose leaders need not worry about public opinion. Or, we'd see them abund in turbo-capitalist countries, where rich people, or associations thereof, can buy legislation and will do so on every occasion when there's money to be made.

If the effective cost of nuclear power isn't limited to the bill of materials of the power plant and the cost of the finished, ready to employ fuel, it's because of reality, not because of tree-huggers.

True, but what about mid-complexity applications, such as office productivity or file management? I'm not convinced that modern (and Modern) UIs really make the "getting to know how to use it" part any faster for them. Why, when I use Office, I often find myself asking the web search engine from a Microsoft competitor about where the designers have hidden some function. For instance, in Access 2007 they hid document-relative actions amid the program-relative options inside what old-schoolers would call a "menu hierarchy" which was visually attached to a pulsating globe in a corner of the screen. In Windows 8, they went a step further and hid fundamental actions, such as "turn off the pc", or "put away everything that I'm working on and switch to the last Modern-style application that I have used", behind esoteric mouse gestures that give the user no visual clue about how to trigger them before he has actually performed them, and very little clue about what's going on aftern he's performed them (possibly by mistake).

Of course, it's also possible that I'm getting old.

In fact, it means "don't use GTK3 outside of GNOME", which is what I said.

No? From the message:

at this point in time I'd advocate against Mozilla, Libreoffice, XFCE or LXDE to switch to GTK 3. They value their independence from GNOME too much.

My comment didn't contain any statement of value about GTK3 or GNOME, so I can't understand the rest of your message about being dickish, lazy, Enlightenment looking bad, me forcing other people to solve my problems, and so on. Perhaps you're talking in general about the attitude you perceive here on slashdot towards GNOME 3, but then if you do that in reply to a message of mine, you make it look like I said any of the stuff you're talking about. Which is not the case.

Which is why at this point in time I'd advocate against Mozilla, Libreoffice, XFCE or LXDE to switch to GTK 3. They value their independence from GNOME too much.

What's the difference between "I advocate against projects that value their independence from GNOME to use GTK 3" and "I don't want you to use GTK 3 outside of GNOME"?

GNOME doesn't want you to use GTK+ any more for non-GNOME development.

https://mail.gnome.org/archive...

In Soviet Russia, trampling workers' rights gets you a monument, having a gay friend (?) gets it to be demolished.

It's not enough to download some files: in order to be susceptible to the attack, those devices should download stuff as root in recursive mode from a compromised ftp server. I honestly can't see that happening in reality.

(But then again I wouldn't believe that home routers could be sold with an internet-facing backdoor open by default in their stock firmware, until that happened.)

Hey, western engines don't blow up! They undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly.

As a user of autoconfed packages, I find autoconf superior to cmake. Packages built with autoconf have standardized mechanisms for uninstallation (a cmake package may generate an install-manifest file, an uninstall target, or none of the two), to specify where to put documentation, for cross-compilation, and to fine-tune the build and the installation. With cmake, I can't even tell the package where to install libraries (most packages will allow you to do it, but each package has a different standard about the way to be told); with autoconf, I can even specify a sed to be run on the name of the installed binaries (useful if different packages provide different implementations of the same binary) and still have the installed package work. Also, with cmake packages building both static and dynamic libraries at the same time is usually impossible.

Moreover, modern autoconf scripts are (relatively) easy to debug and patch when they don't work; cmake scripts are more scattered and they're written in an obscure mainframish language.

That said, I imagine that using autoconf on non-posix systems might be less funny.